Less Effort to Believe and More Effort to Disbelieve: Examining the Interplay between News-Finds-Me and Affective Polarization in Political Fake News Susceptibility in the United States

Drawing upon an online survey of 719 US adult partisans incorporating response latency data, we connected News-Finds-Me (NFM) to the partisan-motivated reasoning literature and theorized it as a consensus-based mode of news exposure that leads to different news-processing pathways, where the vested news-processing effort depends on whether the political falsehood aligns with one’s partisan identity and surrounding majority opinion. Individual-level analysis and headline-level modeling jointly illuminated the asymmetric interplay between NFM and affective polarization. In partisan-consistent scenarios, high-NFM users devoted limited processing time, falling short of cognitive effort to enable affect-laden, directional believing of partisan-consistent fake news. However, when challenged by partisan inconsistency, high-NFM users dedicated significantly more processing time, which exacerbated the relationship between affective polarization and refutation of partisan-inconsistent falsehoods. Contrarily, such an effort discrepancy, widely documented in the partisan-motivated reasoning literature, was weakened or reversed for low-NFM individuals. Extending the “Effort-Reinforces-Directional-Reasoning” thesis to fake news vulnerability, our findings underscore the paradoxical interplay between NFM and affective polarization: while NFM and affective polarization deviate people from active news-seeking and accuracy-oriented reasoning, their joint dynamics form a type of group thinking that reduces vulnerability to partisan falsehoods—even those aligned with one’s partisan attachments.